Vegan Buffalo Chickpea Pizza with Ranch

This vegan buffalo chickpea pizza is the definitive vegan pizza recipe for spice lovers. It starts by smothering chickpeas with a spicy buffalo tomato sauce and baking them on your favourite pizza crust. Cool it down by drizzling over a homemade vegan yogurt-based ranch dressing.

Lately this vegan roasted cauliflower buffalo pizza recipe has been coming up a lot in my vegan Facebook groups. I gotta say, it looks super tasty but we’re in the middle of a heat wave and I don’t want to keep my oven on for that long!

Since I don’t use any vegan cheese products (too expensive), I also like my pizza to be extra saucy to compensate. So I mixed my buffalo sauce in with some regular tomato sauce and added a couple tablespoons of soy yogurt for a bit more tanginess and creaminess (idea adapted from this (non-vegan) recipe).

Slather a few tablespoons of this spicy tomato sauce over your favourite pizza crust then toss the chickpeas into the remaining sauce. Oh boy, the chickpeas swimming in this spicy vegan buffalo sauce looked so good I almost ate them all right out of the pan!

But I managed to restrain myself and spread them out over my pizza crust. For the crust I used this pizza dough recipe. You can make your favourite dough from scratch or use a store-bought one but I would recommend using a thin crust in order to add some texture since the chickpeas are soft.

While your vegan buffalo chickpea pizza is baking you can whip up a simple vegan ranch dressing. Since cashews are ridiculously expensive, my favourite way of making creamy sauces (like this vegan tzatziki) is to use soy yogurt.

For the vegan ranch dressing I combined some fresh herbs that I had leftover in my fridge (parsley and chives) with dried dill, garlic powder and onion flakes. It tasted just like ranch dressing! Of course you can use a store-bought vegan ranch dressing if you can’t be bothered to make your own.

Pizza out of the oven and sprinkled with some chopped cilantro and green onion (a la the buffalo cauliflower pizza recipe I linked to above). If you can afford an avocado it would be a good addition as well.